A little over a year ago, my team and I started thinking about how we do mobile development. We absolutely love Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms, but we felt like it was lacking something. Our clients and designers wanted to push their apps further, but we would often times find ourselves in unable to fully fit their needs. So, we started experimenting and quickly fell in love with the skia graphics library. Skia, if you are not familiar, is the graphics library that powers software like chrome, the Android OS, and other mobile toolkits like Flutter.

Soon enough, we were all jamming through controls, spending late nights up making cool gradient controls, integrating SVGS into our apps and having a blast at it. We realized that this was just the kind of thing that Xamarin.Forms needed and it absolutely took our designs to a whole new level. We knew we needed to share this with the community.

With that, I am very glad to announce our first public release of the Aurora Controls library. In this release, we have tried to hit a lot of the common controls that our clients were looking for. We have cupertino styled controls that look like iOS. There are material styled controls for Android platforms. There are a whole bunch of loading indicators, gauges, and other controls that we hope will make your apps beautiful.

This is our first step out and we want to start off with a bang, so we are heavily discounting our controls for a limited time. We want to help make our Xamarin community even better and in the next few weeks, we will be working to expand the control library even more, create tutorials and samples and act on your feedback.

Additionally, we are releasing a Lite version of our controls that is and will always be completely free for the community. This version has a subset of all of our controls that we will work on expanding over time.

Thanks for everyone who helped make this possible for us and we look forward to seeing your beautiful apps in the future.